We believe that an onboarding program for the DAO can help deepen engagement within governance. However, in the updated proposal, despite its revision, the size and financial cost are still expensive relative to what is being offered.
The revised budget is $171,481 to train 20 participants for 8 weeks, and then 10 participants are paired with protocols. That is $8,475 / student taking the course, and an acquisition cost of $17,148 for 10 fellows to assist protocols. We should be aiming for significantly lower cost to onboard new participants and build programs that can target a much larger cohort size.
In the proposal’s current state, we believe it is overly priced and it should be significantly revised. We recommend the DAO to reject the proposal if it is put up for a vote.
It would also be helpful for the proposal author to clarify who will be conducting the interviews and filtering through the applications, as well as more concrete criteria in evaluating the applications.
Additionally, the proposal could consider the following:
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Refreshing the proposed curriculum as it has been some time since it was drafted & there might be new interesting content to include. Strategic, important initiatives like the OpCo, GCP, STEP, and the Treasury Management v1.2 proposal are examples that should definitely be included in the curriculum.
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Extending this to being an open, virtual course for anyone to attend, and for the top submissions to be paired with protocols.
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Beyond protocols, the proposal could be significantly stronger if it were to be expanded to include organizations that have meaningful partnerships and/or capital deployed in the Arbitrum ecosystem. This could include names like Pendle, Proof of Play, Azuki, and Xai, all of which don’t currently have a governance presence within the DAO. Their success could be intricately linked to the broader success of the Arbitrum ecosystem, which would warrant greater participation in the governance of Arbitrum.
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Distinguish between assisting protocols with governance, and a pathway for independent contributors to get started.